E-mail Newsletters Switching To RSS

prostoalex writes "The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS, the InternetNews.com article says. Chris Pirillo from LockerGnome is quoted saying that people just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters anymore, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer. This short article on About.com also argues for the RSS as preferred format for newsletters, site headlines and all sorts of updates that were e-mailed to customers before."

Comments

Re: Conditional Gets save bandwidth

[sgarrity]

Most RSS readers support HTTP's Conditional GET mechanism, which only downloads the full file if the modified date in the header is different than your last version. This means you can check for updates with tiny (~200byte) requests. For more info, see HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers.

eliminates an obstacle to digital postage

[bcrowell]

People have recognized for a long time that the basic cause of spam is that spamming is free, as opposed to other forms of marketing that cost money to the sender. A sensible response has obviously been to make the sender of an e-mail pay money.

Some objections to this have been (1) how do you process the payments without giving control over the internet to some evil corporation? (2) it's impractical to redesign the e-mail protocols and infrastructure, (3) mailing list operators can't pay to send every e-mail. Well, #1 is obviated by schemes like hashcash, where there's no real money involved. Re #2, this RSS example shows that the e-mail infrastrucure can and will be replaced, and there are ways to do it without having to make everybody change over to a new system overnight -- it can be done piecemeal. The RSS system may also show that #3 is not such a big deal, because maybe newsletters shouldn't go through the same channels as e-mail. (Note that the US postal service doesn't deliver newspapers.) Also, #3 was kind of silly anyway, because people can have a whitelist, and exempt people on their whitelist from paying to send them e-mail.

Matters a lot.

[shamel]

There is a big difference.

For example a web page is "pull" meaning that you have to request it in order to have it. You know the address of the server you request info from.

An email is "push" because anyone can send you email if they know your address.

Pull is better in the sense that it permits you to only accept communication from the publishers you selected. You could do the same for email and only accept mail from ppl and publishers in your address book for example but in some case you do want "unkowns" to contact you. Whereas you positively dont want "unknowns" to contact you regarding "newsletters" and such.

You might say then that we would be better off then reading the "newsletter" (or whatever) off the publishers web site. The thing is that RSS enables you to aggregate all those items from different sources together as opposed to going to all the websites.

Sigh

[rkuris]

Well, I can tell you from personal experience that the LockerGnome folks are not a good resource for telling you what works and what doesn't.

When I first complained that SpamAssassin blocked their newsletter, and merely asked if they could look into it, I was laughed at, and they tried to convince me that I needed to whitelist them or, in their words, "...learn how to use your spam blocking software".

Ironically, months later, they signed up for Habeas signatures on their emails.

It's interesting that NOW they decide to look into RSS as a solution. I wonder if it is because Habeas isn't working.